351 - No place like home: Neil from across the street
Neighbours with knives on the Northside...
Copyright © 2023 by Jeth Randolph
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Neil was tall, about 6’2” and had a wiry build.
His main feature were his eyebrows, or it should be said, the lack of any. He was constantly scratching at some sort of psoriasis he had, and they had dropped out.
This, along with his wide-eyed nervous way of talking, gave him the look of being constantly alarmed.
You’d always see him around the city centre ( especially if you were always there too, I guess) and he never failed to have a dramatic tale to tell of something that had just happened to him.
Like the one about the weird girl he’d become amorously involved with one night, that had freaked him out by repeatedly screaming “Mammy!!!” in a thick Northside accent at key points during physical congress.
As with the rest of us who lived there back then, Neil was broke and we would all hang out with each other in various rooms and small flats around the city.
Neil’s room was in a tenement building across the street from me and shooting the breeze from time to time with some cheap drinks was a common social link – there wasn’t much else to do when “financially embarrassed”.
A persistent buzzing on the doorbell one night in the early hours and I leaned out of the window to see Neil’s streetlight illuminated, and even more alarmed than usual, face looking up from the dark.
He was shaking and freaked out when I let him in.
“Jetro, yah’ll nevah fokun’ bahlayve wot’s aahfter bin happnun’!!”
Over a cup of tea, he told me of his evening at his bedsit across the road.
The ongoing friction with his neighbour over their noise levels through thin internal walls had turned from an inter flat argument to absolute chaos just a couple of hours before.
Door smashed in and a struggle with the neighbour, who came armed with a kitchen knife.
Having punched Neil to the floor, the neighbour jumped on him, overpowered him after an initial struggle and then repeatedly ran the flat of the kitchen knife blade over his face and put the point close to one of his eyes while screaming abuse at him.
Neil had been terrified and tried to placate and reason with him, which seemed to have bought some ass-saving extra time for him as it would play out.
This went on for some time (even minutes?) until the police came having been rung by another neighbour in the building who heard the screaming. They’d been let in and entered the room and arrested the guy.
Extraordinary luck as it seemed that the guy had not had the direct notion to start stabbing him, at least not yet. Rather to dominate and terrify him, which he succeeded in doing.
There’s a theory taught in some circles that a person that shows a knife is not “a stabber” but rather seeking to get compliance through fear and also hiding their own fear.
This incident would seem to have supported this notion, at least superficially in regard to dominating rather than harming but I don’t believe this as some sort of advice or a thing to bet your life on in any way at all.
There are certainly different reasons and initial motivations for being armed but there is still the fact that the guy brought a knife with him to an argument in the first place and from intention to scare to then killing you, is a very close space in that regard.
But what if that struggle had gone differently and Neil had started to get the better of him would he have then thought to stab rather than be beaten and disarmed?
What if help hadn’t arrived? This predicament will be resolved one way or another, not necessarily a good one.
It’s one of those “who knows” moments when everything’s so up in the air and in the balance, beholding to some arbitrary variable.
As would be the case several times in the wake of circumstances such as these that happened and there were a few at that place, a rapid change of address followed for Neil and then myself as there was a definite feeling of “only a matter of time” living there.
Yikes! Yes, I can see that if you are intent on stabbing someone you might be discreet about it, rather than give someone warning. And that showing a blade might bring about the desired result (someone leaving you alone, or scaring them), without the need to follow through. But there are certainly plenty of videos referenced here in the journal of people overtly displaying knives and then going on to use them that I wouldn’t want to rely on that adage.
That must have been horrendous. Poor chap!